Featured Clips

(Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)

How did we get here? A look back on Seattle’s tunnel machine Bertha

(March 2017)

I wrote and produced an online timeline in WordPress, using photos and video, to show the tumultuous history of tunnel-boring machine Bertha’s dig underneath downtown Seattle. I divided the piece by chapters and collaborated departments across the newsroom to create the multimedia display.

After the timeline’s publication, I interviewed with KING5 News, a Seattle TV station, about the machine’s successes and failures. Here is the video clip.

Editors at the D.C.-based news outlet, U.S. News & World Report, tapped me to write a piece analyzing Washington state’s ranking in a “Best States” dataset, which measured states on a variety of metrics, such as higher education and health care. Here is the story.

(Nov. 2016)

Over the course of a week, I fielded responses from families, couples and friends who felt torn after Donald Trump’s presidential victory, some of whom were concerned about potentially volatile holiday gatherings. (Here is the online package. And here is the print A1 page and inside spread.)

The package followed a similar piece before the election, in which people said their relationships were split over the Hillary Clinton and Trump campaigns.

Live updates from the presidential debate (Oct. 2016)

I have reshaped how The Seattle Times approaches developing stories by leading a push to incorporate live online feeds. This is an example of how I pieced together analysis and commentary during a presidential debate, while fielding information from reporters at watching parties.

(May 2016)

Bellevue School District seeks to fire football coach Goncharoff over scandal (May 2016)

After a Seattle Times investigation in 2015, an official with the Bellevue School District’s human-resources department notified coach Butch Goncharoff that the district was planning to terminate him.

The news broke late in the day, though I successfully wrote a full story for print before deadline, as well as posted updates frequently online. (Here is the print A1 page and inside spread.)

Leona Coakley-Spring and her husband, Terry Spring, burn a Ku Klux Klan robe a customer left in her consignment store earlier this year. (Erika Schultz/ The Seattle Times)

Black owner burns KKK robe left at the shop she now plans to sell

(May 2016)

A white man left a bag containing a Ku Klux Klan-style robe at Leona Coakley-Spring’s Redmond consignment store, traumatizing her for months. Residents and community leaders quickly rallied behind the store owner, gatherings that fueled talks across Seattle’s Eastside community on racially-charged harassment.

For the online package, I helped conduct an on-camera interview and worked closely with the visual department to help produce a video.

(Sy Bean/ The Seattle Times)

‘I was one of the lucky ones’: The struggle to get guns out of domestic abusers’ hands (May 2016)

Courtney Weaver, an advocate against domestic violence, helped put a face to a 2014 law at the Washington state Legislature to require offenders with protective orders against them to surrender their guns. But two years later, despite the law change, authorities said too many abusers still had access to weapons, posing huge risks to victims and raising a need for better enforcement of the law.

This story grew from my investigation into King County’s new push to improve enforcement of Washington’s law. After I learned places elsewhere face the same struggle, I expanded the story’s focus.

#ManInTree: Why it went viral (March 2016)

A man stayed overnight in a downtown Seattle tree, attracting the attention of fans and reporters from across the country, including The New York Times.

My story aims to examine the phenomenon and serve as an aggregated display of the mania.

(Greg Gilbert/ The Seattle Times)

When Seattle cops start wearing body cams, who can watch all of that footage? (February, 2016)

Like departments nationwide, the Seattle Police Department has struggled to come up with possible solutions for meeting public requests for body-camera video. Washington state Legislators proposed a measure, which eventually became law, to add new privacy protections so that video of murder victims, private homes, sex crimes and other sensitive images captured by the cameras is not publicly available.

The story became extra newsworthy after Seattle police in February killed Che Taylor, creating momentum for community members who said his death was yet another in a series of senseless killings of blacks by white cops.

(January, 2016)

Hundreds of residents in north Seattle neighborhoods (Ballard, Queen Anne, Magnolia and Fremont) hosted rallies over crime and police response near their homes and businesses, some of whom hired private security officers for extra patrols.

For the story, I analyzed Seattle police crime data to compare neighborhoods and people’s perceptions with the reported numbers. Also, I contributed reporting for the story’s graphic, which shows crime rates over time.

Formerly homeless, outreach leader tells how he escaped

(December, 2015)

Richard McAdams uses his story of escaping homelessness to try to get others out, too, through Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission’s Search & Rescue program. The outreach effort reaches an average 2,100 people monthly, or about 75 percent of the number of estimated people in Seattle without shelter.

The story grew in importance after Mayor Ed Murray and King County Executive Dow Constantine declared states of emergency to address the area’s homeless problem, promising shelter beds and aid for prevention and outreach programs.

A still from the video of Sunday’s crosstown chase of a carjacker shows the Camaro he drove into the Wedgwood neighborhood. (Seattle Police Department)